500 Uses For A Spud

It is this time of the year when the National Archives release another batch of papers so that we can find out what really was going on, rather than what our betters chose to tell us.

One revelation that caught my eye this week was the flagrant lie told by Raisa Gorbachev at a lunch held in her husband’s honour at Chequers in December 1984. At the lunch Mrs Gorbachev got into conversation with the then Minister for Agriculture, Michael Jopling, and inevitably the topic of potatoes came up. Mrs Gorbachev made the astonishing claim that in Byelorussia they had 300 different recipes for the humble vegetable.

Seven months later a rather apologetic Mrs Gorbachev wrote to Jopling owning up to her error. Actually, they have 500 recipes and she sent a book over to prove it!

Alas, the book was in russian and no one has got round to translating it. A task for 2015, perhaps?